Many more people are turning up in emergency departments nationally with problems related to edibles, that range of products containing cannabis that are ingested. Ryan Vandry, a cannabis researcher at Johns Hopkins, says such acute toxicities arise because of misconceptions.

Vandry: There’s a misconception that if you eat it its way safer and its not likely to harm you than smoking it ‘cause smoking is bad for you. Eating cannabis will produce the same magnitude of drug effect as smoking it. When you smoke cannabis the drug effect peaks almost immediately. When you eat something and cannabis in particular it takes anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes for the drug effect to onset and the peak drug effects last for several hours. :30

Vandry notes that people can control the effect of cannabis with smoking but not so with edibles, which contain a wide range of concentrations. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.